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kubic has been added to New Games We Love in the United States! It’s currenty featured in 73 countries and ranked as #1 puzzle or board game in most of them. Download your copy here or check our app page for details.

Well, it’s been almost two years (again) since I’ve posted my previous unity plugin suggestions. So, welcome to my now officially biennial post…

As before, Unity received major updates in the mean time and now sitting at v5.3. Some of the previous plugins are not needed anymore such as Unibill (now integrated to 5.3+) or NGUI as native GUI finally become something useable.

So, I’ll cut to the chase and here are my current suggestions for must have add-ons to Unity as of today.

Most Useful Unity Plugins

DOTween Pro (Link): Just go and get this, it’s super performant and useful. Especially if you are used to working with NGUI and switched to uGUI, you’ll find it’s Animation Component (pro feature) very very very useful.

Grids (any version depending on your needs) (Link): That one depends on your needs. But if you are planning to use any kind of Grids in your game, don’t torture yourself by coding everything and simply use Grids instead. It’ll save you lots of time.

InControl (Link): I’ve found this one by the suggestion from Amazon. You can support all kinds of game controllers and this is also very useful for developing games for TV’s (Apple TV, Chromecast, etc.)

Marvelous Techniques (Link): That one contains bunch of shaders along with some sample scenes. If you’re after a special kind of look for your game, that’ll be a gem.

CloudOnce (Link): One simple API to deal with iOS Game Center, Google Play Game Services & Amazon GameCircle. That was one the most time consuming parts of my work till that one came along. It also support Cloud saving for all 3 platforms, so do I need to say more?

And the rest

Those are still in my list, but I’ve already mentioned them before. Check out my previous post(s) for more information.

It’s been a while since my first post on the subject. Currently, many things changed (even the design) & fixed on iTunes Connect. We still have “Availability Date” but the “Release Date” is now replaced with “Version Release”. I wanted to share how those two options working together to achieve different results.

First, let’s take a look at the options.

Availability Date

That option is still working as before. By default, it’s set to the date of your app record creation. If the current date is greater than this date, then your app will be available on the App Store considering your version is “released” and approved, standing in “Ready for Sale” state. If not, it won’t be available on the store. Btw, you may also use that option to remove the app from sale, if you ever need to do that simply change the date in sometime in future as an alternative to removing the app from regions to do that.

Version Release

This option is mostly used for app updates but currently you can also use that for the new apps. For app updates, you can have an app released & available on the store but might want to withhold the release of an update until a certain event. In that case, that’s the option you’ll want to use.

Current state based on our recent experience.

“New Releases” list problem seems to be fixed. As long as the app is released & available, and that’s happening for the first time (for the region) your app will be featured in the new releases list of that region.

If you have a fixed release date in the future just set the availability date to match it and make sure the app will be automatically released after review.

If you want to release manually, just make sure the availability date is set to a date in the past and manually release the app when it’s time.

Version release might take few hours to make it to the store while availability date works faster. So, if you want to release an app at 00:00 local time of each region, use the availability date. If you release it manually at 00:00 at some local time, it’ll will be available on the store at different times for each region after the app store process complete (which might take some time as noted above).

If you have any suggestions/corrections, please share in comments so I can update the article as needed.